Last week, I shared a Political Meme Scavenger Hunt activity, one of the resources that I also shared at the Computers and Writing Conference in East Lansing, Michigan last week. My session focused on how political memes work and strategies for using them in the classroom. Today I am sharing another resource from the session: online meme generation tools.

The tools listed below all create image macros, the kind of meme that consists of an image and usually some text caption. An image macro can also include an emoji or other drawing as part of the message. The LOLcat on the right is an image macro.

Constraints of Online Meme Makers

The meme generators I collected are free and offer many options. Those strengths come with a down side however. The sites appear to do little review of the memes that are generated and posted. Since the sites are free, they are wide open to anyone who wants to create an image-based meme. Some of the memes on the sites are problematic. You will find images that are racist, sexist, and graphic. Some of the meme templates are also problematic, relying on stereotypes or questionable images.

You will also find that trolls can attack a site, either making it inaccessible or overloading the site with questionable content. The screenshot below shows the recently created memes on the Meme Generator site at the time I was writing this post:

The page was flooded with a pencil meme and text that taunt the website managers. The top left meme includes the caption, “The entire main page will be nothing but this meme.” Other messages on the page continue the theme, criticizing the website and boasting about the attack.

This example demonstrates the problems what you may encounter with using these sites. To address these issues, I suggest the following guidelines:

Review the site(s) you want to use well, and then narrow the list down. Choose the site(s) that best match your needs and local expectations for classroom appropriateness.

Recognize that these sites can and do change in a matter of seconds. A site that may have been fine when you checked the night before class could have a flooded homepage, like the Meme Generator site shown in the screenshot above.

Have a backup plan. If a site is down or has problem images when class meets, have an alternative ready.

Before asking students to make memes, discuss the nature of the site(s) with students so that they will not be surprised if they encounter problematic content. Explain the ground rules for your class use of the resources—what students should do if something problematic appears on their screens, and what kind of content is appropriate for their own memes.

Generators for Specific Memes

One way to avoid problematic meme templates is to send students to specific generators that match the topic you are discussing and that do not begin with an inappropriate image. All of the generators listed here could be used by those who attended my conference session to make political memes:

Meme Generators

These links take you to templates with a range of options. Some of the images may be inappropriate, but these sites give students the widest number of options. Another way to avoid problematic meme images and templates is to choose one of the sites that allows the upload of students’ own images. Students will need to take photos or find images to use, but avoiding the templates does limit the likelihood of encountering inappropriate content.

Final Thoughts

Image Macro Memes give students a chance to combine social media and cultural knowledge with visual rhetoric. To be effective, the image and text have to work together to communicate their message. Students typically have experience with the genre. They know what makes a meme successful and what makes one fail, so their prior knowledge make image macros a strong tool for introducing the design and visual composing strategies that build upon their expertise.

Have you used memes in the classroom? Do you have advice to share or examples that you love? Add a comment below to tell me more. I’d love to hear from you.

Protest Poster showing Grumpy Cat holding an Ethernet cable, with the message, “#NSA Killed My Internet. Now I have to build a GNU one.”

Sometimes a LOLcat is just a humorous comment on life. Other times, there is a specific social, political, or cultural message behind it. Take the Grumpy Cat protest poster on the right. The description on Flickr explains that the image is from “the ‘Freedom not Fear’ protest rally against global internet surveillance at 7.9.2013 in Berlin, Germany.”

This Grumpy Cat poster is part of a presentation I will give at the Computers and Writing Conference in East Lansing, Michigan this summer. To provide some background, the proposal for my session, “Making Memes that Work for Change,” explains:

Political messages in the news and on social media timelines frequently borrow from the strategies of familiar Internet memes, like the captioned images we see on Facebook and Twitter. The rhetorical choice of memes for these political messages enables their authors to respond pointedly to issues that affect them, for as Limor Shifman (2014) explains in Memes in Digital Culture, “[P]olitical memes are about making a point—participating in a normative debate about how the world should look and the best way to get there” (121). In short, political memes work to persuade, to engage, and to move the public to action, all as the authors work to communicate their views of the possibilities for the future.

In the case of this Grumpy Cat poster, a well-known Internet meme (Grumpy Cat) is used to communicate the protesters’ dissatisfaction with Internet surveillance. To kick off my presentation, I will ask participants to try the following scavenger hunt activity that I use with students, using the Grumpy Cat as inspiration. The goal is to provide a quick introduction to the political moves that are used in these memes and build a collection to use as the class (or presentation) explores deeper issues.

Political Meme Scavenger Hunt Class Activity

Find political image-based memes that feature

An animal (cat, dog, bird, etc.)

A new take on a well-known meme

Puns or other word play

A stock photo

A still from a video (movie, tv show, YouTube, etc.)

Be sure that the memes you find are appropriate to share with the entire group. Aim for an image that would be appropriate for a PG-13 movie, and language that is no worse than an R-rated movie.

I’ve included details in this activity to avoid potential problems that can arise when students examine memes. First, I suggested five specific kinds of memes that students should find to keep them from searching endlessly. They need to find five, so they have to use their time wisely.

Second, I provided standards for the images and language that are acceptable. I want to avoid some of the gruesome memes I have seen, but I did not want to censor topics. For example, there are some graphic abortion memes that I find unacceptable for the classroom. I want to avoid anything of this sort that might trigger students. The movie rating system has always worked well for me. I do make sure that everyone is familiar with the system, as there are occasionally international students who are used to different ratings standards.

Finally, I don’t want to force students to approach topics from any particular stance. They should be free to share any position: pro, con, or somewhere in between. That said, there are some topics that are not appropriate. Students usually understand that things like hate speech are off limits, but my reference to the Virginia Tech Principles of Community reminds them.

I did not include details on how the memes will be shared in the activity. The particular class circumstances and resources determine what will work best. Options I have used include the following:

Share the memes in a discussion forum, especially if students are doing the activity for homework.

Post the images in a collaborative Google Document or Slides file, which is useful for small group work (give each group its own document).

Paste the images in an online white board, like Padlet or Note.ly, which is fun for real-time, whole-group discussion.

Email the memes to you (the teacher) and then choose those to share in class, which allows you to review the images beforehand.

Enter the link to and name/title of each meme in a Google Form, which will create a list of the memes that you can use later in the course.

Once the memes are collected, you can use them to discuss argument and persuasion, the underlying political messages, symbolism, language strategies, and visual rhetoric. They also provide the background knowledge for a meme-making assignment—and I will share resources for making memes next week, so be sure to come back! Meanwhile, if you have a suggestion or reaction to today’s post, please leave me a comment below.

Writing a simple email message can turn me into an overthinking scaredy-cat. Am I using the right phrase? Do I sound like I’m apologizing too much? Am I oversharing? Am I being too vague? Ugh.

I end up evaluating, re-evaluating, revising, writing, and then erasing any time I have to send an important message. What should be an easy message telling someone my manuscript will be late or I can’t make a meeting becomes agony.

In the image below, Donovan (@danidonovan) concentrates the kinds of sentences I struggle with into short, direct ideas that avoid unnecessary apologies or padding:

For students, this matrix can demonstrate two things. First, there is the obvious face value of the information: students gain some stronger ways to say things in emails and elsewhere. Second, each pair demonstrates the value of revision, showing stronger ways to phrase the same idea. To use the matrix in class, I would follow these steps:

Students can work in small groups or as a whole class to discuss how the suggested alternatives improve on the original.

Together, brainstorm other email sentences and messages that can be difficult to write. Students are sure to come up with some ideas immediately, such as telling a professor that they are ill and won’t be in class. While you will want to keep the scenarios they come up with appropriate for the classroom, try to push students to get beyond simple scenarios.

If time allows, students can search their email for messages that they have struggled with and add those ideas to the list.

As a class, review the brainstormed lists and identify nine situations to focus on.

Assign each of the situations to a small group or pair of students. Ask students to create their own “Write This, Not That” style suggestions, using Donovan’s matrix as their model. The groups can record their suggestions in a shared class document if desired.

Once all the groups have completed the task, ask groups to present their recommendations to the class, and arrange for everyone to have a copy of the suggestions for future use.

To go beyond the original matrix, students can think about other writing situations that they encounter frequently, creating “Write This, Not That” suggestions for other tasks they complete, such as description, persuasion, and research essays. As another option, students can review their own drafts, identify sentences or phrases that they have struggled with, and then work together to create “Write This, Not That” alternatives in a group peer review activity.

Final Thoughts

ADHD can be difficult to explain, and even harder to talk about. We're creative, friendly, and misunderstood by a lot of people. My hope is to help people with #ADHD feel understood and seen, and be able to share their experiences with others.

Her comics can inspire other writing activities as well as discussion of how to communicate ideas that readers may not be familiar with. If your class is exploring comics and graphic novels, this collection demonstrates how a comic designer has used the genre to share her message with readers.

If you try any of these activities, I would love to hear from you. Please leave me a comment to tell me how it worked in your classroom or share other ways to use these resources.

With television's arguably most prominent dramatic series ending amidst the ashes of King's Landing and the outrage of many of its most loyal fans (including a remarkable Change.Org petition demanding an entire Season 8 redo), I find myself reminded of Frank Kermode's classic study, The Sense of an Ending (1967). Exploring the ways that human beings use storytelling in order to make sense of their lives and history, Kermode focuses his attention on the "high art" literary tradition, but the same attention can be paid to popular art as well in ways that can explain, at least in part, the extraordinary reaction to GoT's final two episodes. Here's how.

First, let's note that fan pressure on creative artists is nothing new. Charles Dickens' readers pleaded with him, in the serialized run-up to the climax of The Old Curiosity Shop, to please not kill Little Nell, while Arthur Conan Doyle was successfully lobbied by disappointed readers to bring Sherlock Holmes back from the dead after apparently killing the popular detective off in "The Final Problem." And movie producers routinely audience-test their films before making their final cuts. So all the popular uproar is not really different in kind from things that have happened before, but it may be different in degree, which is where its significance lies.

Because no one, except for the series' writers and actors, appears to be fully satisfied with what finally happened after eight long, and violent, years in the battle for the Iron Throne. The most common complaint seems to be that Daenerys should have been allowed to follow her "character arc" to become not only Queen of the Seven Kingdoms but also a kind of messiah. However, it isn't my purpose to wade into the controversy to offer my own opinion about what "should" or "shouldn't" have happened, for that's an esthetic, not a semiotic, question. Rather, I want to look at the extravagance of the negative response to what did transpire and what it tells us.

To understand this response we can begin with the fact that Game of Thrones ran for eight years as a continuous narrative—conceived, in fact, as one gigantic movie: a TV "maxi-series" if you will. Eight years is a long time, especially for the show's core audience of millennials who effectively entered adulthood along with GoT's main characters. This audience largely overlapped with the generation that grew from childhood to adolescence as the Harry Potter novels were published and filmed, and who also were on hand for the definitive cinematic Lord of the Rings: the fantasy novel to beat all fantasy novels first raised to cult status by baby boomers and turned upside down and inside out by George R.R. Martin to create A Song of Fire and Ice.

Such a long wait, at such a formative period of life, is simply bound to build up a great load of gestaltic expectation, a longing for the kind of ending that would redeem all the violence, betrayal, and heartbreak of this essentially sadistic story ("Red Wedding" anyone?). Both The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter novels prepared viewers for such an ending, one in which, to quote Miss Prism from The Importance of Being Earnest, "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily." Instead, everyone got something more along the lines of King Lear.

And there you have it, for as Miss Prism tartly adds, happy endings are "what fiction means”—or as Frank Kermode might put it, the triumph of the hero and the defeat of the villain is one way that our story telling makes sense of (one might say, makes bearable) the realities of human experience.

But that isn't what George R.R. Martin—who knows full well how the triumph of the House of York only led to Richard III, whose defeat, in turn, brought Henry VIII and Bloody Mary to the throne—ever appears to have had in mind for his epic saga. Mixing historical reality with a lot of Tolkiensque fantasy, Martin (whose own conclusion to the tale is yet to come) thus put the show's writers into quite a bind. Because a completely conventional "happy" ending would have contradicted the whole point of the story, while a completely dismal one (say, Cersei triumphing after all) would have really enraged the customers. I use that word deliberately, for in popular culture audiences really are customers, and they expect to get what they pay for (the complaint on the part of some fans that by making GoT's producers and actors rich they were entitled to a better wind up than they got is especially significant in this regard). So Benioff and Weiss essentially compromised in the way that pop culture usually does. The really bad villains do end unhappily, and the Starks do regain power after all, but Martin's fundamental thesis that power itself is the problem is preserved in the madness of Daenerys at the moment of achieving absolute control.

It wasn't a bad compromise in my view, but it quite clearly hasn't been a successful one either. Still, because of the odd reversal in the relation between novel and film, with the film being concluded before the novel was, the game isn't over. If the novels ever are concluded, I suspect that Martin will have more shocks up his sleeve, beginning, I suppose, with King Bran turning tyrant and bad trouble between Jon and Sansa.

Google Forms make an easy task of collecting information from students for class discussion and writing activities. Just gather student responses your Google Form, and use the collected responses as the basis of class discussion and related activities.

All you need is a Google Drive login and one question, meant to gather information on the projects that students are working on or their recent reading assignments. For demonstration purposes, I’m using the question, “What is the title of your report?” I’ll suggest some other questions at the end of the post.

Once you log into Google Drive and have your question ready, it’s a matter of these three basic steps:

Step 1: Create Your Form

Set up a one-question survey that asks for no personal or identifying information. Since responses are anonymous, you avoid any FERPA complications.

Once you log into Google Drive, create a new blank form.

Give your survey a title, replacing the default “Untitled Form.”

Replace the default “Untitled Question” text with the question you want students to respond to.

Change the type of question to “Short answer” if Google does not change the type automatically. Note: Google tries to interpret your question and adapt the form, so it may make this change for you.

If desired, click the palette icon on the upper right corner of the page to change the colors and add a background image.

With your form ready to go, give students the link to your form. Click the SEND button in the upper right corner of the page to choose one of several options:

Send via email

Get a link to share

Copy code to embed the form on your page

Post to Facebook

Send out as a Tweet

Once you send out the link, all you have to do is wait for students to respond. You can look at my Title Survey to see an example of a student-ready form.

Step 2: Check the Responses

Once students have submitted their answers, spot check the questions to prepare for discussion and to check for any problems.

Log into Google Drive.

Open the Form you created.

Click “Responses,” as indicated by the red arrow in this screenshot:

The form will switch to show the responses that students have submitted. You can select the list and copy it, so that you can edit it in your word processor if you like. You can also have Google Forms show the responses in a Sheets spreadsheet.

Read the Response to determine the likely topics for class discussion and to remove anything that doesn’t belong. For example, the Responses to the Title Survey show that students would benefit from revising for length and wordiness and should review the rules for capitalizing titles. There is also a title that shows the student has chosen a topic that does not fit the assignment, so I would remove that response to avoid any embarrassment in class. I would write to that student privately before class.

Step 3: Lead Your Class Discussion

Kick off class discussion by sharing the Responses to the question. You can share a link to the responses or a link to the word processor document you created with the responses.

Give students several minutes to review the list, and then let their observations guide the discussion. Begin by asking students what they notice about the Responses. Encourage them to look for patterns and idiosyncrasies. Try sorting the answers alphabetically to group similar responses. As a class you can collaborate to revise Responses if appropriate.

Final Thoughts

I used this activity to ask students to examine and strengthen their document titles. You could use a similar Google Form to ask questions such as these:

What is your thesis statement?

What is your favorite sentence in the paper (or in a reading)?

What is the biggest question you have about the assignment?

What do you emphasis in your conclusion?

What is the first sentence of your document?

How would you summarize today’s reading?

In addition to asking student to respond to these questions by thinking about their own papers, you can have peer review partners respond with their observations as well.

This activity is simple but powerful. Students can quickly see how everyone has responded to a particular task, and then they can make observations about what works and what doesn’t. By asking students to add their information to the Form, you can concentrate on what you want to talk about, rather than the busy work of setting up the list of responses.

Do you use Google Drive in the classroom? Have you used Google Forms? Tell me about your experiences by leaving a comment below. I’d love to hear from you.